Geoffrey Cain — Steve Jobs in Exile: NeXT, Failure, Revenge and the Remaking of a Visionary - The Innovation Show

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
the way that I like to framethese questions, and I come from a

(00:02):
background as a journalist, is whatfailures allowed you to find success?
And what did you learnfrom those failures?
Steve Jobs, we don'tremember this about him.
It's something that history tends toforget because these are uncomfortable
truths about what it takes to win in life.
Steve Jobs was nearlybankrupt in the early 1990s.
He was almost out of money.

(00:24):
He was down according to the people whoknow him, down to his last $150 million,
which sounds like a lot of money to us,but he was burning $50 million a year,
so he only had three more years of, cash.
He had no investors.
They all abandoned himbecause he was losing money.
His products were failing one afteranother, and this was his final chance.

(00:46):
He, knew it.
His friends knew it.
If these failures in this period ofhis life had continued he would have
been written out of history, and therewould be no Apple today as we know it.
Apple would have probably goneout of business because he would
not have been able to return toApple and make it great again.
I hope you're enjoying our BusinessBiography series and this book,

(01:07):
brilliant book on Steve Jobs in Exile.
It's with thanks to our friends atKyndryl who run and the technology
systems that drive advantage forthe world's leading businesses.
With a unique blend of AI-poweredconsulting built on unmatched managed
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(01:29):
You can find Kyndryl and the KyndrylInstitute, K-Y-N-D-R-Y-L, at kyndryl.com.
today's book tells the largely unexploredstory of the dozen years Steve Jobs
spent building NeXT Computer in the
aftermath of his firing from Apple,the company he founded in 1985.
This period would see Jobsat his most creative, most

(01:52):
vulnerable, and most intense.
It would redefine him as a designerand a leader, ultimately leading to
the later resurgence and dominance ofApple following his triumphant return.
Yet, this crucial periodremains woefully under-covered.
And I might add, and I'm gonna pick upa different book, we're not covering
this book, because in a way, when youread today's book, you realize this

(02:17):
book was very much edited and very muchcontrolled the corporate narrative.
Today's book tells a totally differentstory using a treasure trove of new
material, including dozens of hoursof unbroadcast footage of Jobs at NeXT
meetings, retreats, new interviews, andunpublished oral histories with Jobs and

(02:38):
his colleagues, new first-hand material,and countless internal documents.
This book is the definitivehistory of the most remarkable
period in the life of Steve Jobs.
It is a pleasure to welcome theauthor of Steve Jobs in Exile:
The Untold Story of NeXT and theRemaking of a Technology Visionary.

(02:58):
Geoffrey Cain, welcome to the show.
Good to be here, Aidan.
Good to see you
Great to have you with us, man.
I want to tell our audience, I hadorganized to interview Geoffrey about
his other brilliant book about Samsung,and in the meantime, he has a baby girl.
Congratulations for that, man.
Appreciate it
And then he drops this baby on the world,too and man, is it such an eye-opener

(03:22):
because it tells you the true story.
And maybe we'll start off and share aboutthe amazing access to sources, the source
materials you had for this, because…
And maybe talk about the differencebetween that book and the Jobs
Isaacson story, because thisis the unvarnished version.
Aidan, good question.

(03:42):
The original Walter Isaacson biography,"Steve Jobs," is the first history.
This is first time that Steve Jobshad given his notebooks, old audio
recordings, all his old files, hisinterviews to Walter Isaacson, who
is the defining, one of the leadingbiographers of our generation.
So certainly a major work of history.

(04:04):
It's a it's a book that tells thestory of Steve and his journey
from Apple to Apple, you could say.
That he started out as this thisbratty visionary who certainly was very
intelligent, creative, had great ideasthat he wanted to put out in the world.
And he was fired from Apple inthe end, went on this detour into

(04:27):
NeXT Computer and Pixar, and thenreturned to Apple and was triumphant.
"Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacsonis the big book on Steve Jobs.
That's the first book, andsince then there have been more
biographies that build on whatWa- Walter Isaacson accomplished.
So my book, "Steve Jobs in Exile," isthe latest of the Steve Jobs biographies,

(04:49):
but I have taken a different track.
I I've, been looking at this from adifferent angle, and the question I

was asking is (04:56):
what happens when a visionary like Steve Jobs, who is the
king of entrepreneurs, this personwho is the greatest hero, if you're
in technology or business, you studyhis life, you study his products,
you study his his decision-makingprocesses in business schools, in

(05:18):
corporate boardrooms among CEOs.
This is the man who everybody's--they know and they swear
that they know his story.
But the question I wanted toask is: what is it like to be
Steve Jobs when you're failing?
did Steve Jobs have to do to becomethe Steve Jobs who we all know?

(05:40):
every hero out there, you lookat any hero in our society
both fiction and nonfiction.
You can look at ancient mythology.
You can look at even "StarWars." You can look at Theodore
Roosevelt, Winston Churchill,Abraham Lincoln, George Washington.
Everybody who has made a mark on theworld, almost everybody, has gone

(06:04):
through the wilderness at some pointAnd what do I mean by wilderness?
The wilderness is the time you arefacing your greatest tests, when you are
learning what it takes to be a leader,and it's a period that so many great
leaders have to pass through before theycan truly tap into their real power.

(06:24):
So this is a book about whatit takes to lead Apple, what
it takes to become Steve Jobs.
You A lot of people havethat creativity in them.
A lot of people are brilliant,but they don't go through those
wilderness years, and that's whythey never tap into their true power.
Steve Jobs found that, and he found thatat his company called NeXT Computer,
and that's what the book is about

(06:45):
Brilliant man.
And I was sharing with you before,I'm writing my current book, and the
whole idea is that when you whitewashor varnish the stories like has been
done, and whether it was done or not, Imean, it's done brilliantly by Isaacson
and, and it's no disregard to that ordisrespect to the work that he's done, but

(07:06):
it's not helpful for people who strive.
And I- we talked about this concept ofsurvivorship bias, where you pick the few
that survive as the exemplar, and it isnot helpful for anybody else trying to
help, to ha- trying to strive for that,genius or that, that accomplishment.
And in a way, that'swhat was done with Jobs.

(07:26):
And when you read your book, you see verymuch how close he was to failure, how
badly he treated many of his colleagues,how badly he treated many of his suppliers
and people who wanted to collaborate.
And just the, fact that he had thisvision didn't mean that he was a

(07:48):
brilliant leader, didn't mini- meanthat he was a brilliant business person.
In fact, in many ways, if you're a goodperson and you try to lead to a certain
amount of morals, you couldn't havedone what Steve Jobs did and survived.
And he's lucky because acouple of things went his way.
There's a lot in there, but maybeyou wanna share that, theme of
the idea of survivorship bias.

(08:10):
You look at famous peopletoday, successful people.
As a society, we tend to biasourselves towards their successes.
We ask, "How did you makethis successful thing?
How did you make this beautiful painting?
How did you make thiswonderful product, this iPhone?
How did you lead your country to victory?"

(08:30):
These are the things that we oftenask, especially as journalists, and
that is what survivorship bias is.
But not many people step backand look a little bit earlier.
So the way that I like to framethese questions, and I come from a
background as a journalist, is whatfailures allowed you to find success?
And what did you learnfrom those failures?

(08:51):
Steve Jobs, we don'tremember this about him.
It's something that history tends toforget because these are uncomfortable
truths about what it takes to win in life.
Steve Jobs was nearlybankrupt in the early 1990s.
He was almost out of money.
He was down according to the people whoknow him, down to his last $150 million,

(09:11):
which sounds like a lot of money to us,but he was burning $50 million a year,
so he only had three more years of, cash.
He had no investors.
They all abandoned himbecause he was losing money.
His products were failing one afteranother, and this was his final chance.
He, knew it.
His friends knew it.
If these failures in this period ofhis life had continued he would have

(09:35):
been written out of history, and therewould be no Apple today as we know it.
Apple would have probably goneout of business because he would
not have been able to return toApple and make it great again.
This is an example of a story where,you know, NeXT Computer is a, company
in which so much of the technologythat we use at Apple now, especially

(09:55):
the software, comes from NeXT andcomes from what Steve learned at NeXT.
But if anything gone just slightlydifferently if the, trajectory had
changed at certain points and Stevehad done something differently,
our entire technological worldtoday would be radically different.
We would not have theiPhone as we know it.

(10:16):
We would not have the same smartphones.
We wouldn't have thesame operating systems.
Even the way that we create software,the way that we create apps, and the
way that we create these uter- userinter-interfaces everything would be
transformed in some different systemthat we wouldn't even know about, and
Steve Jobs would just be a footnote.

(10:37):
He would be one of those guys somewherein a history book that you come across,
but doesn't really matter quite as much.
It's only because Steve through a mixtureof perseverance, of a an ability to
learn, to absorb those lessons, and abit of luck, that's why he was able to
become the Steve Jobs who we now know.
I love that, and I think it'ssuch an important aspect.

(10:57):
I often think about this idea ofquantum universe and there's v-
s- several variations or multiplevariations of the same track going on.
And what you said there, I thought abouthow Henry Ford had initially looked to
have an electric car, and it was onlybecause the market wanted gasoline or
whatever happened, and we have gasoline.

(11:17):
And you go, "Well, what would havethat meant to the environment?
What have, would that meant to oil asa supply across the world?" And that's
one of the things I took from thisbook, is that those things and the drive
and the pain that he was to work with,demanding things from software engineers,
leaning over their shoulders as you tellus, asking them to change things when

(11:39):
they're in the middle of things underunbelievably tight deadlines, and how
it redirected the course of history.
But I thought we'd sh- share about theorigin, where you pick up the story.
So the story picks up, it's April11, 1985, only two years after Jobs
has recruited John Sculley, andSculley has organized to fire Jobs.

(12:01):
And just to put this in context, atthe time, Apple was also failing, and
Steve had entered into secret talksto sell Apple to General Electric.
A lot of people won't know that.
Maybe we'll pick up the story from there
Apple was hitting one of its worstyears in 1985, which was the year
that Steve Jobs was being sidelined.

(12:22):
What had happened is that Stevehad recruited John Sculley,
the former PepsiCo CEO.
There's the famous line, "Do you wannacome join me and change the world, or do
you want to make sugar water the rest ofyour life?" And John Sculley said, "Of
course, I'm gonna join Steve Jobs becausethis man is charismatic, he's brilliant,
and he's changing the world with hiscomputers." But what realized upon getting

(12:46):
deeper into Apple as its new CEO is, wasthat Steve was horrific to work with.
He was a monster in these early years.
He was immature, certainly brilliant,certainly visionary, but immature,
unable to work with people crass.
He would fire people on the spot,scream at them, yell at them, tell

(13:08):
them that they're not good enough.
He was just not he was notthe kind of leader who people
at Apple wanted to work with.
And what made it worse, this is somethingthat in, the history tends to forget,
is that the original Macintosh, the,and the early computers that Steve
envisioned did not do well on the market.

(13:29):
He had his brilliant vision.
He wanted to put his vision out into theworld, but he wasn't thinking about what
people really needed from these computers.
It was more of an ego tripfor him, unfortunately.
and so what ended up happening in 1985,the spring of 1985, is when things started
going south between John and Steve.

(13:50):
John said that Steve wasgetting out of control.
He needed to be brought back in.
John was the CEO.
Steve, and this is something that we tendto forget, Steve was not the CEO of Apple.
He was the chairman of the board, but heonly led the Macintosh unit, and he was
behaving as if Apple were his company.
But John Sculley the people around himsaid Steve, this is not your company.

(14:16):
Yes, you were a co-founder, but youhave to work with teams." And so John
eventually got the board together,said, "Look, this is not working.
I cannot have Steveinterfering with my job as CEO.
He needs to be brought to heel, andI am the boss here, and this is the
company that I'm going to lead."And the board sided with John.

(14:37):
So Steve was sent off into a kind ofexile that summer not the full exile
of this book quite yet, but the exileof the summer of 1985 when he had been
stripped of all actual authority at Apple.
He was being shunned because he wasseen as an outcast in Silicon Valley.

(14:58):
And these are the interesting,quiet moments that we often
overlook in the life of Steve Jobs.
We tend to think of those,keynotes and the pr- the brilliant
presentations he gave and theapplauding the applauding crowds.
But this period of his life when hewas suddenly exiled by the company he

(15:19):
co-founded became something differentbecause it started off in quietude.
was sitting outside of his home at night,looking up at the stars, trying to figure
out what he wanted to do with his life.
He had a girlfriend named Tina.
They went off to Europe together.
They were wandering the streets of Italy.
They even entertained staying in Europetogether, maybe making that his future.

(15:42):
Steve thought about returning to the US.
He considered entering politics decidedthat he didn't want to because he
had never even voted in his life,and he was just like "I, don't know
anything about politics." So it's areally unusual time in the life of
Steve Jobs because really see a manadrift, a man who history remembers as

(16:04):
a great visionary, but a man who wasdeeply uncertain about his own future
and the things that he was creating.
It took a while for Steve torecollect himself and to to,
get his bearings back together.
But it was this summer of 1985 thatset the stage it's one of those summers

(16:25):
the people who were there with Stevesaid that he was a different Steve.
He was adrift.
He was he was gone.
They didn't really know wherehe was going, but he wasn't the
man who could command a room.
He was the man who just wasn't sureif he wanted to do this anymore.
And if he decided that he didn'twant to do this anymore, know, he
would've gone off to Europe and justbecome an expat in Italy or France

(16:46):
or somewhere looking at paintings.
And in some quantumuniverse, he's, he did that.
Yeah, there's some
alternate universe out there wherethere's a, there's an elderly
Steve Jobs with a long beard takingart lessons in Paris right now
And he has an orchard ofapples, not Apple computers.
Brilliant.
Yeah.
But one of the people I, I thoughtwas interesting was the Mac

(17:06):
financial controller, Susan Barnes,and she re- previously reported
to Jobs and now he was gone.
And Apple rented an office acrossthe road, and she said it was
amazing to see how ostracized he was,and she felt it was really cruel.
And it made me think, and I'm sureyou've worked with people like this or
witnessed people like this, Geoffrey,who when they're in positions of power,

(17:30):
people obey and talk to them and comesee them when they're around them.
And then either they lose their job insome reshuffling in an or- in a reorg,
or they retire and nobody calls them.
Nobody shows up to them, and they'relike, "Thank God that person's
gone." In a way, that's whathappened to Jobs in this period.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
And I've seen that close and up front too.

(17:53):
I used to work in Washington DC governmentcircles, and that's just a fact of life.
One day you're the one day you'rethe rooster on the block and the
next day you're the, feather duster.
And that's what happenedto Steve Jobs this summer.
One day he was at the top of the world.
He was on the cover ofmagazines and on TV.

(18:13):
He was a celebrity in those early days.
But suddenly when he was fired,all that came crashing down and it
really led him adrift into this world
internal questioning, of internala, kind of internal strife, I think.
Steve talked about that summer.
There are interviews with him and he saidthat he felt like he had been punched in

(18:36):
the gut and the pain was just unbearable.
That he had spent the whole summerjust having that feeling in his gut.
He said these things.
It's it's, one of these of life that Ithink that a lot of us have to go through
at some point, and it's the realizationthat the success and the fame you

(18:56):
have now, it's not guaranteed forever.
It's necessarily often afleeting kind of success.
And the good times roll, butthe good times might not last.
So love it while you have it, butmight not be where you are forever
There's a couple of characters I'dlove to share, and I have, a weekly
article I call The Thursday Thought.

(19:17):
And The Thursday Thought actually, theorigin came from this blog that I followed
for a long time called The Monday Note,and it's by a guy called Frederic Filloux
and a guy called Jean-Louis Gassée.
And Gassée is an interesting character.
He shows up in Apple and verymuch antagonizes Steve as well.
Maybe we'll share a little bit about him

(19:37):
Jean-Lou- Jean-Louis Gassée is you couldcall him the Steve Jobs of his day.
He was the, alternate Steve Jobs.
If Steve Jobs had not become who hewas eventually, Jean-Louis Gassée
would've been certainly secondin line at most or at minimum.
And so anyway, so Jean-Louis Gassée wasthe head of Apple's France subsidiary.

(20:01):
The French subsidiary wasthe highest performing one
in the world outside the US.
And so Jean-Louis Gassée wasreally a star in the company.
He was approached by John Sculley,the CEO , to come into Apple and
to be Steve, the new Steve Jobsafter Steve Jobs had been sidelined.
And John Sculley has saidthis directly in interviews.
He said that he saw Jean-LouisGassée as the next Steve.

(20:25):
Um
Jean-Louis Gassée, flamboyant,charismatic character, fascinating
guy interviewed him for the book.
He is very smart.
He is a, articulate speaker.
He knows how to use just theright touch on the things he says.

(20:46):
Je ne sais quoi
yeah the, yeah, the je nesais quoi, as the book says.
And during this time in his life, hehad a, wonderful sense of fashion.
He was on the, front cover ofFrench men's fashion magazines.
He really was a charismaticperson who came in and took over
the Apple marketing division.
So he was brought in when Steve wassidelined, but then promoted to a

(21:08):
higher level title than what Steve had.
And Jean-Louis Gassée, he went in thereand he, had a new vision for Apple.
He wanted to do thisthing called Open Mac.
The Open Mac was thedifferent from Steve's vision.
Steve wanted to have a closedsystem in which you couldn't you
you, couldn't really take outports and, that sort of thing.

(21:32):
Jean-Louis Gassée bringing in thisnew regime into Apple that was gonna
replace the vision of Steve Jobs.
That's how his friends saw it.
And yeah, he was he, was a rival to Steve.
Steve did not like him.
There were instances y- over theyears, Steve had called him evil
at one point to a journalist.
And these two men at this time atApple, they just they didn't really

(21:55):
get along, and they just saw each otheras the, opposites of each other, you
could say, or something like that.
Steve was really annoyed that somebodywas coming in to take over his unit,
and it was gonna be Jean-Louis Gassée,who was charismatic and colorful and
could really replace Steve as thespiritual heart and soul of Apple.
It's great.

(22:15):
And I just wanted to let our audienceknow it's really worth reading the book
to discover these types of characterseverywhere throughout the book.
One of the really important characters,and he wrote the forward to the book,
a brilliant forward, is Dan'l Loehn.
And where he crops up was that Steve,in that wilderness when he was in, in
Italy, in Paris, traveling around, hedecided to put some structure on his

(22:38):
thinking, and he wrote down his favoriteprojects from the last 10 years at Apple.
And one of the trends that emerged washis desire to around- his attraction
to education-related initiatives.
And this is where Dan'l a- appeared,because he was responsible for the
education division, one of the mostlucrative, and probably saved Apple

(22:59):
at a certain point from shutdown.
I- and actually, they went throughquarterly losses and factory
shutdowns, including here in Ireland.
Maybe we'll share a little bit aboutDan'l because he comes up time and
time again, and also had an interestingpostscript after Apple, after NeXT,
which was his time in the museum

(23:19):
Dan'l Lewin was the right-hand manto Steve Jobs during this period.
He was the man who created somethingcalled the Apple University Consortium,
and it was an effort to get Applecomputers into universities and also to
schools, elementary and high schools.
The goal was that if you couldget Apple into schools, you

(23:40):
can find young customers.
They'll show their families, maybe theirfamilies will buy some, and th- these
will become lifelong Apple customers.
And in a sense, that was correctbecause look at what happened.
Look at how at least i- in the US, Applecomputers were in a lot of elementary
schools, and a, lot of that generation,the millennials, the Gen Xers, they
grew up and they became Apple nerds.

(24:01):
They, loved the iPhone and,all that sort of thing.
So smart marketing is something if you'rea business student, worth studying as
a model to really capture an audience.
And Dan'l Lewin was the architectof this idea of putting Apple
computers in universities.
But a man at the front lines, what hekept finding at universities was that,

(24:23):
look these were not high schools whereyou only needed a little Macintosh
that could type and draw and you couldteach students how to use a computer.
These were major research institutionswhere scientists were doing
cutting-edge laboratory work, andthey did not want a little Macintosh
necessarily to draw and paint on.
They wanted a supercomputer that couldhandle futuristic modeling at the time.

(24:48):
Whether that was biology orphysics or whatever it might be.
saw-- This was-- Remember,you have to remember what
technology was like in the 1980s.
These kinds of capabilitieswere so far ahead of the era.
It's not like today where youcan open any laptop and you
have ChatGPT talking to you.
This was a time when the leading edgewas just starting to come, and the next

(25:14):
generation of computers, everybody waspredicting, was going to solve some of the
greatest scientific questions of our time.
So what they told Dan'l was"Stop." we don't just wanna
see your little Macintosh.
We wanna see serious computing power sobring us that." And what happened with,
the help of Dan'l and other executivesat, and other employees and executives

(25:38):
at Apple, was that they decided tocreate a new product called the Big Mac.
So this is a Macintosh that wassupercharged, something called the 3M
machine, which was gonna be the nextgeneration of computer at the time.
The 3M machine was gonna be the one thatthey would put in these laboratories.
But what it what ended So this was Steve'sbrainchild, and what ended up happening

(26:03):
was that when Steve was sidelined,Jean-Louis Gassée came in and canceled it.
So everybody who had been workingwith Steve on the 3M h- was so
upset, and they decided, "You knowwhat, Steve You've been sidelined.
Apple's not working for you anymore.
You're 30 years old, whichin Steve years is old.

(26:24):
He was always a young success-su- young successful person.
And they said, "Look, let'sgo start a new company.
Screw Apple.
We don't need Apple.
Let's do something new here,and let's create this 3M machine
that's going to change the world."
Before we go there, becausethis is a chapter you entitled
Mutiny, where these people leave.

(26:44):
But I just wanted to give a flavor ofthe almost a red thread throughout the
whole book, which is his desire forrevenge on John Sculley and his desire
to, to show that he's successful apartfrom Apple and how they're ruining Apple.
But meanwhile, inside Apple, after hisdeparture, even though some people were

(27:07):
initially happy that he had gone they,chafed under John's staid leadership.
They missed Steve's vision andflair and his, even his intensity.
And even there, they wore T-shirtssaying, "We want our jobs back." Maybe
we'll tell a bit of that, about that,and that ongoing poisonous desire to

(27:29):
show Sculley's terrible and I'm great
Y- a lot of what Steve did he, he leftApple in September 1985, he founded his
company called NeXT Computer, which wasgoing to make these new cutting-edge
machines for universities specifically.
But Steve was starting out onthe wrong foot in this journey

(27:51):
because he wasn't doing thisnecessarily to change the world.
He said that he was changing theworld, but at a deeper level what he
was doing was he was trying to getrevenge against Apple and John Sculley.
his reasons for foundingNeXT were not entirely pure.
There was an ego to this.

(28:15):
the people around him talked aboutthis when I interviewed them.
They said that Steve wanted nothing morethan to get revenge on John Sculley and
show that he could be a success, thathe could beat Apple, that he could beat
John that he was gonna s- show John who'sreally who's the real genius in here.
It's not John, it's Steve.

(28:35):
And y- when you're starting a businessthis is not a reason to start a business.
It's unfortunate, and this is whatset up Steve for the troubles that
were to come because he wasn'tmaking decisions because he wanted
necessarily to sell a great product.
He wasn't thinking about the customer.
He wasn't thinking about whatthe world needs from him.

(28:58):
He was really at a fundamental levelthinking about what NeXT Computer
can do for Steve in the early years.
And what NeXT Computer could dofor Steve was to give him the
satisfaction of being a genius.
Steve was w- Steve was essentiallybuilding a monument to himself and to
his own vision, but failing to thinkabout the people around him who were

(29:21):
there helping him, the talent that hewas hiring, what the customers needed,
what the investors wanted him to do.
was really thinking about himself, andthis is an example of the narcissistic
leader just getting too out of control andmaking a series of bad decisions that's
gonna set them up for failure later.

(29:42):
I, it's such an important thing tocall out, I think, that narcissistic
leader, because many leaders ofstartups or founders don't have the
skills they need to lead a company.
They may have the skills to finda company, but to actually lead it
on, like we saw here with Steve,and it takes a very special type of

(30:02):
employee to actually tolerate that.
And I wanted to lead here because th-there's these important people who were
the original Nexters, these people wholeft, and Steve tricked Apple into this.
He entered into John's office and handedhim an envelope with the low-level
employees, I'm doing inverted commashere for people only listening to us,

(30:23):
who he wanted to come with him, andthis was part of his deal of leaving.
It was Rich Page, Dan'l Lewin, BudTribble, Susan Barnes, and George Crow.
And John looked up shocked and said,"These aren't low-level employees."
Let's tell a little bit of story abouthow he departed Apple and the, es-

(30:43):
essentially the lawsuit that happenedas a result of that, and how much
both Apple and NeXT spent on thatlawsuit, and eventually what came of it
Steve was not known in those early yearsfor being you know, totally honest.
He he was known to, to eitherfudge the truth or outright lie.
And one of the things he said goinginto John Sculley's office this one

(31:05):
morning in September 1985 was, "Yes,I'm taking five employees with me, but
don't worry, they're just low-levelemployees, so it's gonna be okay."
But once John saw the list, hesaid, "Wait a second, Steve.
These are not low-level employees.
These are stars in the company.
You're taking people who aredoing great work." And John

(31:27):
just didn't know what to say.
So they met with the board, and the boardsaid, "Look th- this is we can't have
this situation." John-- They, accusedJohn of not showing enough leadership.
They said, "Steve has just walkedoff with these employees that we
wanted to keep here." And finally,they decided in the end that the only

(31:48):
solution was to sue Steve Jobs andanother employee named Rich Page.
So what's interesting is that one of thefirst things Apple did was sue Steve,
its co- its co-founder, they didn'teven sue NeXT Computer, the company.
They actually literallyjust sued Steve and Rich.
One of the first things that happenedis as the NeXT Computer founders

(32:09):
were all gathering at Steve'shouse, they were preparing their
next steps preparing the logo,thinking about the name and so forth.
Suddenly a a server process servershows up from the court and says,
"Okay, you're being sued by Apple."
And they're like for what?
We don't even have a product.
We don't have anything here.
We we, literally, we don'thave money in the bank.

(32:30):
We don't have we literally justregistered our name with the California
Secretary of State a few years ago."And they were just flabbergasted,
and it's like, what is this?
It's it, was the kind of situationwhere it sent chills down the spines
of the co-founders of NeXT becausethey were asking themselves, "Did I

(32:50):
just make the wrong choice? Am I goingto be a part of this company with
Steve that's about to go down with agiant legal bill?" Apple is retaining
every single lawyer in Silicon Valley.
No, almost nobody wants to representNeXT Computer, which is a unknown company
and is up against the it's, the Davidand Goliath battle of Silicon Valley.

(33:13):
So it just, it, it became this fiasco,and they had to defend themselves while
having their, bank account dried upwithout even having a product and figure
out a way to prove to a judge in, SanJose courthouse "We, don't have a product.
We, can't steal intellectualproperty from Apple.

(33:34):
What is it that we stole when wedon't actually have anything that
we're selling at the moment?" And itwas a tough case because they really
were fighting the giant of the time.
And these giants, theyhave a lot of lawyers.
They have s- you know, they havesophisticated case arguments.
The case went on for a number of months.

(33:55):
And finally it was resolved in the end,but it was just like it was one of the
most stressful times in the lives ofthese people who were involved at Next
I can imagine just joining a new companyand then this is your first task.
You haven't even y- got to theboard, the whiteboard of what
product you're gonna build.
But, uh, m- maybe let's goto c- the conclusion of this.

(34:16):
So the lawyers cost Apple20 million, just to say.
It was a huge, chunk to take outof this, and Apple wanted for, to
force Steve into building premiumhigh-performance computers only.
And for Steve, this was perfect.
And maybe we'll wrap this in thestory of Br'er Rabbit, because
that's how, how you describe it

(34:39):
So the irony of this lawsuit is thatSteve got exactly what he wanted.
He was able-- So Applewas bleeding money dry.
At one point, somebody, one of theApple lawyers said that their entire
legal budget for the year had justbeen blasted through with this lawsuit.
It was backfiring because itmade NeXT Computer look more

(35:01):
important than it really was.
If Apple's suing them, clearly there'ssomething really big going on here, right?
So it actually gave Steve a boost inthe media, and he had his sympathizers.
And finally at a certain point, aboutfive months into the lawsuit Apple was
throwing court documents at them, throwingsubpoenas, saying, "You have to give us
your se- give us the secrets, show uswhat you're doing." And NeXT Computer

(35:24):
just said, "Look we, don't have anythingto show you because there's no product.
So we can keep going on.
We're gonna go, we're gonna go on andon." And even at one point the judge
said "This is getting ridiculous.
Seriously, come on, guys just, settle."And in the end, Apple approached them
with a settlement, and the settlement,ironically, was a victory handed to

(35:45):
NeXT Computer because NeXT Computer,according to the settlement, was
allowed to build a high-powered,high-performance computer for the time
that would be used for universities,and that's exactly what the plan of
the company was in the first place.
They were gonna build a more com- amore powerful computer than Apple.
So Steve washed his hands andsaid, "Thank you, Apple," and "All

(36:07):
right, let's let's get started."
And I'll leave for those, you'llprobably be reading this to
your newly born daughter at somestage, the story of Br'er Rabbit.
That's the the tale that happenshere, that you get exactly what
you want while pretending not toget to want that thing at all.
But maybe we'll just rewind a littlebit, because when he exited from
Apple, he needed two things fast.

(36:29):
One, and, and I often think aboutthis, how much of what he did was
driven by this desire for revenge orthis the desire to just redemption,
to show redemption that he's clevererthan Apple, that he's done well.
And he stoled off 21.4 millionof Apple stock and invested

(36:50):
7 million of his own money.
But he did it, importantly, atthe worst possible time, and
it was a financial disaster.
But so driven he wasthat he ate that loss.
And the other thing was I, thoughtabout Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
It's like Jobs' hierarchy of revenge.
And it was like, it was, he pushed downhis the enemy, which was Pi- Bill Gates,

(37:16):
and he even went with a name in 1985,which was NeXT Inc, which was actually
a name that Microsoft was using before.
Maybe we'll tell a little bit about that.
That's one of the untold storiesof this book, the name NeXT.
This is not something that waswidely known in the life of Steve
Jobs back when he was around.
But NeXT it's, So there was alogo designer who he hired to,

(37:41):
to help help him choose a name.
The name he was originallygonna choose was Two, Steve was
thinking Two is a great name.
But the logo designer, his namewas Tom Suiter he, heard the
name Two, and he's wait a second.
You don't wanna benumber two to number one.
You don't wanna be the second in line.
And who's number one?
That must be Apple, right?
So you're just, you're shooting yourselfin the foot with that name." And so Tom

(38:05):
flew to Seattle, and he was at this thisevent with Bill Gates talking, and it was
r- you have to remember, this is the year1985, so the CD-ROM is a new concept.
People today don't even use them anymore.
But Bill Gates was talking aboutthe CD-ROM being the future of
storage, the future of computing.

(38:25):
And as he was talking hekept saying the word next.
This is gonna be the nextthing the next big innovation.
People the, next generation ofusers, they're all gonna use
CD-ROMs on their computers.
They're gonna put their games on itand their music, and they're gonna
put it into their computer, and thecomputer plays this, beautiful music.
And the designer Tom wassitting there in the audience.

(38:47):
He had his little notebook, and hekept thinking, "Oh next, Huh, that
really rings doesn't it? It's gotmomentum." So he went back to Steve.

He said, "I have your name: NeXT." Steve said, "I love it (38:57):
undefined
One of the things just on the next wasyou, see, right, so this is a startup.
I just wanted to c- contrastthe startup founders.
So, Dan'l, people like Dan'l, who wasgoing through, uh, the legal fight
at the time with Apple, nearly broke.

(39:17):
He had a mortgage, collegeloans, two kids, and a wife who
just suffered a medical issue.
And what, I found really interestingwas, a- and he does this in the forward,
Dan'l is, to show, "Yes, we workedfor this person. Yes, we may have done
financially well, but we weren't… Wehad a lot to endure during that time."

(39:39):
And i- in a way, by actually going andfollowing him, you were siding with
l'enfant terrible, or the terribleinfant, as Dan'l put it, which was Steve.
Because at the time, it was very difficults- 'cause Steve's reputation was poison.
So it was a huge lift for these peopleto go and take Steve's side, because

(40:00):
it could have been a poisoned chalice
That was one of the bigdowners at the time.
A guy like Dan'l Lewin, You haveto remember everybody who joined
Steve, they were relatively young.
They were in their 20s andearly 30s for the most part.
they had mortgages, they had youngkids, they still had university debt,

(40:25):
and they had things to take care of.
And it's not cheap to livein Palo Alto, Ca- California.
That's even back thenit was fairly expensive.
And by following Steve, they werereally betting their futures on
somebody who was seen as a fallen star.
If, say, the Apple lawsuit, let'ssay Apple had won or Steve had run

(40:49):
out of money from that lawsuit,they would be all out of work.
They'd just be failures.
They'd be chased out.
They wouldn't be able to find a goodjob anywhere else in the Valley.
And one of the th- one of the thingsyou have to remember about this
period is that Silicon Valley was notas-- nearly as big as it is today.
Nowadays, if you're a softwaredeveloper, you can just move.

(41:12):
It's like a revolving door.
You just go from job to job, andyou'll get raises every time.
This was a time when there were onlya few big companies doing everything.
There were some startups,but not that many.
And if Apple sued you, fired you, gotaround, it got around to IBM, it got
to GE, it got to Intel, all the majorcompanies of the day, and you were toast.

(41:33):
You would, really be out and sentoff maybe back to the East Coast.
You go, work in a stodgy old office inNew York, but you're not welcome among
the, frontier technologists of the era.
I mentioned there, I was hintingtowards his just i- ignorance towards
spend, or maybe you call it ignorance.
Maybe it's a good thing.
He just, how much he spent andhow much he burned through.

(41:57):
You were talking about PaulRand, who designed the logo.
Th- those type of people, theyall threw in huge, like $100,000
at the time was a lot of dollars.
It was much more than it is worth today.
But also, even when he went afteradvancements happening in the computer
graphics industry, he went afterPixar, which was George Lucas' company.

(42:19):
Maybe we'll share this part,because really this was one of
those kind of throwaway investmentsthat really saved him later on
Pixar, was one of hisbig early investments.
What was happening was that George Lucashad a hostile divorce and he owed his
ex-wife millions upon millions of dollars.
And it was so ruinous GeorgeLucas had to sell Pixar.

(42:43):
Pixar at the time, it was a partof Lucasfilm, the the Star Wars
company, and it, was not profitable.
They were making, were m- theywere making a machine that
only sold about 300 computers.
It was supposed to design specialeffects for movies and so forth, but you
have to remember that special effectscomputer graphics were a very new thing

(43:06):
and it wasn't even clear they weregonna become a big thing in Hollywood.
So Pixar s- was struggling.
Steve came, Steve bought it up at a firesale rate, and it was one of those bets
where, you know, at the time it looked abit crazy because people were asking, "Who
the heck wants to turn on their TV andlook at something that a computer created?

(43:29):
It's all pixelated garbage." Andthere was even one-- And here's a
behind-the-scenes, an outtake fromthe book that didn't get in there.
There was an event in Beverly Hills thatSteve and some of his Pixar executives
went to around this time, and theyshowed one of the early films in the
1980s that Pixar was involved in.

(43:49):
I think it might've, itwas it, was before Tin Toy.
Tin Toy was a Oscar-winningfilm, and I can't remember
what the… It was like a demo.
I, don't remember the details, but theyshowed it and the audience watched it.
It the, show finished and it was justsilence in the room, and they were
like, the heck did we just watch?
That, that's the weirdest thing I'veever seen." So no, like Hollywood did

(44:11):
not think Pixar was gonna be big. Theydidn't really see Steve as one of them.
And so Steve walks in, makes this dealwith George Lucas, and people are saying
"Steve, is this really a good idea?
You're about to buy a failingcomputer graphics company.
You're spending $7 million tostart a company that's gonna
create computers for universities.

(44:32):
You're getting spread thin.
It sounds to me like you're just doingthis because you want revenge against John
Sculley, but is this actually your vision?
Do you really think this is gonnasucceed?" And Steve insisted it
would, but it wasn't clear atthe time that it actually would
It's amazing how those storiesappear time and time again.
I was just, we just covered Nokia as acase study in the show, and in Nokia,

(44:57):
the CFO recommended that they buy thenetworks business that they'd kind of sold
to Ericsson, and nobody wanted to do it.
And then they bought it,and now they're back.
Nokia are back because they boughtthat and sold off the mobile
phone businesses, and nobodywanted to let go of that identity.
And you see this, just the luck thathas to be luck that, uh, that… And

(45:19):
it showed up, and as we see later on,it kind of saved, it saved Apple in
the, in the end when Pixar went onto have great hits like Toy Story.
But let's, shine a light littlebit on Steve's temperament and
how working with Steve demandeda certain type of temperament.
Many people have, many people wholisten to this show have worked

(45:40):
with people like this, that in away it's kind of like standing up
to a bully, that you stand up to…
Bullies don't like to bebullied, or they don't like
people who can stand up to them.
They like people that they can control.
And to work with Steve, youhad to evangelize for your
ideas and for yourself.
And the culture was so combative thatyou tell us that when NeXT veterans moved

(46:02):
on to other companies later on, theirnew colleagues would tell them to dial
it back a bit because they'd never seenthis type of temperament showing up.
But this is where you tell us aboutthe famous shithead, hero shithead
rollercoaster that many, many peoplewent through, and the amount of
telling downs people went through.

(46:23):
There's so many case studies of this inthe book that it's too many to share.
Maybe you'll pick some of theexamples you like to share
Okay.
The hero shithead rollercoaster.
single NeXT and Apple executive Isat down with for this book talked
about the hero shithead rollercoaster.
That was like the number one topic.
They were like, "If you don't understandthe hero shithead rollercoaster, you

(46:46):
do not understand Steve Jobs." So whatis the hero shithead rollercoaster?
his leadership style his swings inwhich one day you were a hero and
the next day you were a shithead.
One day you could be making theproduct that's gonna change the
world, and Steve was lavishing youwith praise and just talking about

(47:07):
how great you are, playing you up in,in the meetings, company meetings.
And then suddenly the next day, forwhatever reason, you're a shithead,
and Steve walks in and tells you're ashithead, and he says, "This is shit.
What are you doing?
Your product sucks.
Your software sucks.
Do it this way.
Make it better." And then Stevewould come back later and,
check on it, see if it improves.

(47:28):
The hero shithead rollercoaster wassomething that had no predictability.
You could make a beautiful productand Steve would love it, but you could
make a product that you still thoughtwas great and Steve would hate it.
And it could be within days ofeach other, and that's just how
he was in these early years.
He was mercurial.
That's a word that's used about him a lot.

(47:49):
But as a result of thishero shithead rollercoaster,
everybody was on their toes.
Steve was the king of the court,and to get anything done, you
ultimately had to please Steve.
You had to be on Steve's good side.
what this did, it created an intenseculture, a highly creative culture
in which intellectual combat was theway that great ideas pushed through

(48:13):
the furnace and got out to the world.
So Steve wanted people who couldwithstand the force of his personality.
He would look at them.
One of the reasons he would go inand call their product shit was
because he actually wanted them tofight back and defend themselves.
When Steve was hiring people atNeXT he would ask them a question.
He asked almost everybody this question.

(48:35):
He said, "Are you the best person inyour field?" And if they said no or
hesitated or said maybe I'm second orthird best," would just kick them out
and say, "I wanna talk to the best personin the field, so don't waste my time."
He was asking you that trick questionbecause he wanted to see how you could
defend yourself when Steve said thatyour ideas sucked, when he said that

(48:58):
you're not the best person in your field.
He wanted to see you say, "Steve, I amthe best, and this is why my idea is
best, and I'm gonna make it as great asit can be. So we're gonna get this done."
That's what Steve respected in people
Their team dynamicswere difficult as well.
I mentioned earlier on the Jobshierarchy of revenge, but there was
also his hierarchy of how he ratedpeople, and it wasn't to do with their

(49:24):
skillset, it was their expertise level.
So what I mean here is not their levelof contribution, but what they did.
So for example, he'd tell us stufflike software was top of the pile to
him, digital hardware team second,and then the bottom was analog.
So they were essentially the plumbers,and he disregarded them that way.

(49:44):
And as a result, they just didn't havethe exposure to him, and they were
probably treat… Reading between thelines, they were treated a lot worse
So Steve did, in those early years,he had a hierarchy of talent and
his favored group was software.
The reason was because the softwaregroup was working on a a style of
software development that was novelat the time called object-oriented

(50:06):
programming, and this is the idea-- Youhave to remember in, in the age we're
talking about, the 1980s your typicalcomputer was just a line of code and
you had to code everything by hand.
There was no Claude code that couldcreate an app for you on the spot.
You literally had to go in there andjust do everything, and it would take
months, and then there would be onebug and it would crash the whole thing.
So object-oriented programming was thenext the next era of programming that

(50:32):
Steve was pioneering, and it was thisidea that you could develop software as
you develop clay, that you could takethese things called objects which were
building blocks of software that werepre-made that you could use for anything,
and you could put them together andthey would interact with each other and,
they would create beautiful software.
So this was software as beauty andsoftware as usability, something

(50:55):
that was very new at the time andsomething that Steve valued highly.
So for him, the software team was thekiller team because he thought they were
the ones who were gonna change the world.
The digital hardwarecame second typically.
It depends on, who you talk to, but forthe most part digital hardware was second
at the moment, and that was because theywere making the beautiful cube computer.

(51:18):
The-- And what NeXT Computer wasknown for was this cube design he had,
developed an almost perfect cube withidentical sides, identical angles that
still sits in museums today as thisexample of brilliant industrial design.
So Steve loved that because it wasthe computer as art, another idea that
was still really novel at the time.
But then you get to things likeanalog hardware engineering.

(51:41):
That's, as you said, the plumbing,it's the cords the plugs, the outlets.
Where does that all go?
Steve just ignored them.
He didn't really care.
The one time that he did seem tocare about this was a, an episode.
He was gonna release a new computer atNeXT, and at the last moment he told
George Crow one of the guy who headedthis, unit, that you need to redo the

(52:04):
wires because I wanna have one wirethat connects to the computer and
goes in goes into the wall." So anyApple fan out there will immediately
recognize that as the iMac, but thiswas almost 10 years before the iMac.
This was Steve's vision.
He wanted that computer to have thatone plug only because that was beauty.
And George said, "Steve, you can'tdo that because we are only X amount

(52:27):
of days from launch, and to do plugsand stuff, you have to get regulatory
approvals, and there, there's a lotyou have to do." And he just blew up.
This is one of the key scenes of the book.
And Steve said, okay.
This was one of the, one of the rare timesthat Steve, at the time, started listening
to his people and decided to back off.

(52:48):
He was realizing that his grand visionwasn't working with everything, and
he did have to listen to the experts.
But to, to, your point, hardware that'snot where the action happened for Steve.
That was the bottom priority.
But over time, he started realizingthat, yes, you can create beauty
with this analog hardware.
You can create even a cord can bebeautiful, and it doesn't just have

(53:11):
to be the software and the screen.
It's the whole machine itself.
there's another side which manypeople who've worked with a founder
have experienced as well, whichis the double standards that
this rule applies to you, not me.
Do as I say, not as I do.
And one of those was Steve's… Hewas so used to a champagne lifestyle,
and I, by that mean a corporate,how- his corporate expenditure.

(53:34):
And one of the things was he dropped 100Kon the logo, like I mentioned earlier on.
But he had brought that lady, SusanBarnes, who made the comment about
him being in exile earlier on, withhim as CFO, and she was trying to
mind the money, mind the purse.
You could see what theywere burning through.
And despite this, Steve one daypipes up and says, "We've stopped

(53:55):
nickel-and-diming, and it all adds up."
And then the next thing, two monthslater, and I'll show this on the
screen, it he, takes an ad out inthe paper after he learned about
Chiat\Day, the famous advertisingagency had been fired by Apple.
Let's tell this little story justas an example of how he spent money.

(54:16):
You mentioned the cube, for example.
How much money theyspent on spraying that.
The, eventually the factoryin Fremont, there was so much
Steve went into NeXT Computer witha grand globe-changing vision.
He went in this-- So we all knowSteve Jobs as the scrappy guy

(54:36):
in the garage who never took ashower and walked around barefoot.
That's the guy we see in the movies.
That's the guy we knew.
But at this point, SteveJobs is 30 years old.
He's he's, starting to age, andhe's found a taste for luxury.
And so at NeXT Computer, he wantsto start off as the Mercedes.
He doesn't want to start offas the Ford, not like at Apple.

(54:59):
He wants to start at the top.
And so what that means is that he wantsto hire the best logo designer he can
find, the best designer he can find.
He wants to pay $100,000for the NeXT logo.
He hired Paul Rand, who at, in thisage was one of the most famous logo
designers worldwide, and actuallyin history designed IBM's logo

(55:22):
and many other, UPS, many otherlogos that are still used today.
He Steve really just went, wild withhis spending and what was wild about
it was that this was his own money.
Usually at companies you'renot spending your own money.
Usually it's shareholder money.
It's that's how it works.
It's revenue.
It's the company's money.

(55:44):
Steve literally would write the checks,pull money out of his account, write
the check, and his reasoning was that bystarting at the top, would set the bar
high, and that, that would be what allowsthe NeXT computing revolution to happen.
It's much harder to start atthe bottom and to climb your
way up, as he did at Apple.

(56:05):
It's much better to start at thehigh point of the hill, and then
from that hill, you can move toother hills more easily without
having to descend and ascend.
You're at the top already.
That was, it was a gamble and it wasit, was a kind of narcissistic gamble.
He did have the vision, but itwas really about him getting

(56:26):
that revenge on John Sculley.
And it turned out to be a mistakebecause he was spending all this
money betting that perfection wouldallow for the customers to come to
him, that the customers would simplyrealize "Oh, this guy is brilliant
and his computer is brilliant."
So Steve doesn't have togo out there and, sell.

(56:48):
Steve expects that these people aregonna knock down a path to his doorway.
They're gonna see this beautifulcube computer, this beautiful
object-oriented programming.
They're just gonna get it.
They're gonna see hisextremely expensive factory.
Steve Jobs was making everythingin-house from from the
motherboard to the final product.

(57:10):
He assembled his own robot line, likerobot hands making stuff, which is
very advanced for the time period.
And every, robot arm in this factory hadto have the exact same shade of gray.
And like he, he spent money, sohe, he hired I. M. Pei, the, one of
the most famous architects in theworld, to design a floating scar-

(57:31):
staircase in the headquarters.
He spent $10,000 on luxury chairs.
Like he really went all out thatby starting at this elite level
as a business, that the perfectionwas going to guarantee success.
But that was where started going southbecause that's not what happened, and he

(57:53):
ran into the messy realities of the worldthat, look, people buy products because
they want you to solve a problem for them.
And your $10,000 luxury chairis not solving your problem.
Your robot arms on the assembly line,yeah, that's all neat and the, computer is
beautiful, but how does this giant work ofart on my desk actually solve a problem?

(58:15):
What can this do that my regularApple or IBM PC can't do?
And that's where he got tripped up, andthat's where things started going south
There's a lot of fake it till you makeit here, where he'd made it, but he
hadn't made it with this type of machine.
And there's a couple of really importantpoints here that y- you talk about

(58:36):
his famous reality distortion field.
Many founders, a lot of people havethat charisma that people just listen
to them and believe them, and hemanaged to bring some people in.
You mentioned about how importantthis machine could be for
academics, but also for governments.
And somebody that was very much linkedto the government, a previous war
hero, was Ross Perot, and he eventuallygave him 20 million for 16% share.

(59:01):
That gave him confidence.
That gave him now more money to keep a bitof runway, and also for the employees who
probably couldn't believe it at the time,going, "We don't even have a product yet."
So maybe let's share a bit about Rossand what he brought to the table, and
eventually how he ran out of patience.
So Ross Perot was an American war hero.
He's also a man who ran for president.

(59:22):
He was one of the most popularpresidents not from a political
party in about a century.
And we see American politicstoday with populism.
Ross Perot was the original populistbefore this whole thing existed.
And I say that he was certainly not, y-and I'm not talking about the toxicity
of today, but he was a good guy.

(59:43):
He was a great guy who people respected.
And so war hero there was one, onepoint where I mean-- Okay, so this kind
of badass stuff doesn't happen today.
Uh, in the Iranian Revolution of1979, he hired a team of commandos,
including his own employees, to go intoIran and rescue their employees from

(01:00:07):
an Iranian prison and bust them out.
So we're talking Chuck Norris like he'slike the Chuck Norris of technology.
So Ross Perot comes in, tough as nails.
He's this military man and veteranwho looks at Steve and sees something
in him, the level of creativity thatyou don't see in many other places.

(01:00:27):
And Ross, against of his advisors,decided to bet all this money on Steve.
He really thought that Stevewas gonna be creating the
brilliant computer of the future.
You have to realize how unusual this was.
Today you can be a companywithout a product and you can
still raise billions of dollars.
The economy is so different today.

(01:00:47):
But back then in the year 1986, itwas expected that if an investor
was gonna write your check, youhad to demonstrate results already.
Ross was making just an incredible betat the time that not many sane investors
would have made, and it was because, inpart, he was taken in by Steve's charisma.

(01:01:09):
He often said in private conversationsthat he saw something of himself in
Steve, that Steve was somebody wholike, y- for most people, you have to
get to your 50s to get to that levelof success, but Steve had accomplished
it by his 20s, so clearly he was onthe rise and he was gonna keep rising.
But Ross Perot he doesn't take prisoners.

(01:01:30):
These guys are tough and youcan't fool them for long.
The charade was happening.
It was clear that theproduct was being delayed.
NeXT Computer was not on track torelease a working computer anywhere near
the timeline that they had promised.
And eventually that charade f- fallsapart and Ross Perot and Steve Jobs

(01:01:50):
were headed towards a collision course.
At what point does the investor giveup, and at what point does the creator
have to drop the, fakeness and toshow what he's really capable of?
And that's what happened in this book.
Maybe we'll say a, a word onthe constant tinkering, delays.
Again, many people who've worked with anen- entrepreneur know what this is like.

(01:02:13):
Leaning over your shoulder, watching yourwork, being a bottleneck, stuff all has
to go through them, they have to havesay, et cetera, which is important in
the early days, but it's not scalable.
And you think about here having strategicpriorities, and we realized this recently
, when we covered the BlackBerry story,that the strategic priorities were

(01:02:34):
no more than targets, sales targets.
But for NeXT, they calledit the deep shit list.
Yep
And this was Steve going through, what'sthe thing that's gonna put us out of
business next that we have to fix?
So Steve's early strategy for thebusiness was, "What's going to put
us out of business and how can wefix it now?" And he ran this thing
called the deep shit list, which wasa list of problem items that he would

(01:02:59):
list at every single company retreat.
He'd have a big whiteboard, andhe had two categories typically.
One of them was shit list, andthe other one was deep shit list.
And if you had a product on the deepshit list, you were in real deep shit.
That was a common phrase at NeXT.
if you were on the deep shit list youwere up for-- He would march you in
front of the room and tear into you.

(01:03:20):
He was not afraid to takeprisoners with this one.
But the problem became that he wasbuilding a company based on negatives
and not so much on the positives.
He did have the vision for his com-his cube computer, but the way that the
company evolved was that it was a companybeing ruled based on shit lists and

(01:03:43):
be- the fear of going out of business.
They were running-- He would alwayssay, "We're running out of money.
We're, our product's not working.Stuff isn't working." That's no way
to run a company, and that's evenwhat NeXT executives would tell me in
interviews, that you can't run an entirecompany based on the fear of failure.
You have to run a company based on thetrue faith in what you're doing, the faith

(01:04:06):
that the people around you can make it asuccess and that you can do it together.
And so in the first half of NeXT, theseearly years that we're talking about,
Steve was very much a fear-based leader.
He thought that he could scarepeople's way into success.
That if, we go out of business, you'regonna lose your job, so you better
pay attention to the deep shit list.

(01:04:27):
But as the story of NeXT went onthis deep shit list started to fade.
Steve started to realize that this is noway to run a company, and the way to run
a company is that you create priorities.
That there are maybe 10priorities for the week.
There-- it's not a shit list.
It's not, "We're gonna go out ofbusiness," but it's simply, "Can we

(01:04:49):
apply practical, pragmatic fixes andimprovements to make this a better
product?" So there was a subtle change inmindset that happened in the next years
that showed what Steve was learning.
It's, going from beingreactive to proactive.
And once Steve became proactive, hewas able to unlock his true magic

(01:05:10):
and to really make things happen.
I really felt that throughout readingthis, that this was fueled by bitterness,
this project, this next project.
And maybe later on, the Applestory was fueled by creativity.
It was fueled from a different place,and it just shows you that fuel can get

(01:05:30):
you so far, but you run out of that fuel.
While when you change thesource of that fuel, it actually
can be something different.
That's just at a metaphysical level,something that, that came to mind.
And then the other thing, andI just wanted to say this to
people who are out there who haveworked for somebody like this.
I have seen people operate like this, likeSteve Jobs did, and they do break people,

(01:05:50):
and they make people feel worthless.
And those people go on toget therapy afterwards.
And just to say topeople, it's not just you.
You can see it at this level.
And I think that's one of the importantthings you call out, Geoff is, h- how
much damage this can do to people as well
And so many of the people who workedwith Steve Jobs their, entire lives, they

(01:06:12):
harbored anger and bitterness towards him.
The tantrums, the tirades the, humiliationin front of entire company offices.
People really were upset with him.
And when Steve died, one of thethings that almost everybody told
me was that they forgave him becausethey realized it it was, hard.

(01:06:39):
They had been anger-angry all those years.
They had cried in meetings 'cause ofSteve, but they had realized how much
he had changed and transformed, and theyrealized that he had gone from being
this monster brat being able to lookat somebody and reach into their soul
and pull out the greatness inside them.

(01:07:00):
He found things inside them thatthey didn't know about themselves.
And they all told me "Without Steve,without his talent for looking inside
me, I would not be who I am today.He brought the best out of me, and he
showed me what I'm capable of." So theymourned Steve, and they missed him.

(01:07:20):
And they miss the fact that wedon't really have a lot of leaders
like him in the world right now.
They, want a return to that greatness.
So the question a lot of peopleask and this is something that
executives ask me and NeXT executiveshave asked me, it's right now Apple
is a company that's struggling.
It's not doing as great as it used to.

(01:07:41):
AI, not its thing.
Tim Cook stepping down possibly soonas the who's gonna be his successor?
Nobody knows.
But what happened to the vision?
What happened to the innovation?
And why is it that Apple todayis not bringing the best out
of the people who work for it?
Like why, what happened to theold Apple under Steve, and what
does it take to lead Apple?

(01:08:01):
And they always go back to NeXT andthey say, "This was the crucible of
Steve's life, and this is where helearned what real greatness takes, and
we need to go back to that at Apple now."
Brilliant, man.
Maybe we'll just share a coupleof more things, and Geoff's kindly
agreed to come back for a parttwo of this because we've only got
through a tiny amount of the book.
It is so deep.
There's so many stories, andit's such a, an interesting read.

(01:08:25):
You'll fly through reading itas well, so s- so interesting.
One of the things on theDeep Ship list was storage.
So if he's gonna have this megacomputer, it's gonna have good
storage, and it needed probablya different type of storage.
And serendipitously, Canon reached outto Steve to go, "Have a look through
our database here of patents, stuffwe've been working on," because they

(01:08:47):
saw him as this visionary that wouldspot something that they didn't.
It turned out to be a masterstroke and actually led to
investment eventually from Canon
you have to remember at, the timecomputers were incredibly basic units.
You, might have like two megabyteson your computer, four megabytes.
The typical computer in aperson's home was not capable of

(01:09:09):
anything like what we have today.
And the question was how can weexpand storage to get to that
next level of computing forthe research, for the science?
And Canon was developing a laser disc.
This was not like theCD-ROM, it was not a DVD.
It was a- an alternative technologythat they were gonna start pushing out.
Steve s-so Steve was going throughthe offices of Canon out in Tokyo.

(01:09:35):
They wanted to invite him out becausehaving Steve Jobs around your office
blessing technology was somethingthat everybody wanted, 'cause if
Steve took it, you would assumethat it would succeed out there.
He would do something with it.
And so Steve spot-- itcaught his eye right away.
It's like he saw that disc and he waslike, "What's that?" And he held it up,
and it's this beautiful this gorgeousshimmering like a, mini disc, not like

(01:10:00):
a CD, but something that's smaller.
And it really at the timehad the look of the future.
What really caught Steve was this,with this one was it wasn't only the
potential it could hold many moremegabytes on one disc, but the beauty
of it the shimmering beauty, thefact that it would whisper to life.
It wasn't noisy like thetypical hard drive at the time.

(01:10:22):
It i-if you can remember oldcomputers, the discs were really loud.
They would make thesegrinding noises sometimes.
But this was true audio and visual beautybundled together into a little disc.
And so Steve bet the future of NeXT on it.
He, wanted this to bethe core of the computer.
He said, "No hard drives." Now,can you imagine that today, like

(01:10:46):
a computer with no hard drives?
It's like you have to wonder what hewas thinking, but this shows, like,
how creat- how creatively he wasthinking about what he was doing.
So Steve bet the farm on this little disc.
And this is where things went awrybecause the disc was so far ahead

(01:11:09):
of its time that it wasn't gonna beable to make it to the market and
make any significant difference.
It became one of the most expensivecomponents in the computer.
was certainly beautiful, butit was so new that it was
untested and it broke down a lot.
It only worked on NeXT computers,which meant that you couldn't swap

(01:11:29):
it and use it on your PC or your Mac.
You, could only use it onNeXT, which is very limiting.
And it had a number of other problems too.
Office dust would kill it.
A lot of them were returned.
The, typical disc I learned fromlooking-- I looked through archives
that showed that most discs died aftera few months, and even the replacement
discs also died, the disc drives.

(01:11:52):
It's a product that had so much potentialand it's such a Steve Jobs product 'cause
it's so beautiful, but It's not practical.
so this is one of the reasons why NeXTfailed early on, was because Steve would
not give up on this idea of having disk.
He, in the end, he put a hard drive onthe computer too, not his plan, the disk

(01:12:15):
was so bad they had to have a hard drive.
So it's like it ruined the wholepoint of it, and then no one was using
the disk when the computer came outbecause they were just so unreliable.
It, the whole thing just became a fiasco.
So what's the lesson here?
Beauty is not enough.
Elegance futurism these things aregreat ideas that we can all try to
live up to, but you also have to bepractical for the times that you live in.

(01:12:40):
And if the industry is going in onedirection, sometimes you actually
have to follow the industry.
You cannot just splinteroff and do your own thing.
A lot of companies havelearned that one the hard way.
Also Sony.
There are lots of examples ofcompanies that have fallen on this
idea of a not invented here syndromeof having "We're gonna have our own
tech that nobody else can use." Andit did not work for Steve at NeXT.

(01:13:02):
And so what he had to learn was how tobe practical, how to build, a company
that's useful to people, that's practical,and then from there you can go create
your walled garden at Apple later.
You have to get the foundations inplace first before you can just build
your own thing that nobody else can use
there was an interview with him and WaltMossberg, and he famously said that Apple

(01:13:27):
betted on technologies in their spring.
And I felt here he was forcing,trying to force, a season before
spring and trying to force thistechnology onto the world as well.
M- last thing would just be, we've seenhow he burned relationships with people.
For example, in Fremont, he wentthrough five or six office managers,

(01:13:47):
and used to take the stock back as well.
So those people didn't benefitfrom stock, they just left.
And I thought about how many people bothwere interviewed by him who were burned,
and how many people who just went,"I've had enough of this," over time,
including board members over the years.
We saw it in Next as well.
But one of the other thingshe burned, and you see how
self-destructive he was relationships.

(01:14:09):
Some of those relationships, for example,IBM the business retailer as well who sold
the, basically an early day, warehouseBest Buy type company that, that sold, and
just how critical he was of them, of theirpractices, looking over their shoulders,
even redesigning their PowerPoints
So that's-- that was a companycalled Businessland, and it's one

(01:14:33):
of those big firms that's beenforgotten today but was actually quite
important in the life of Steve Jobs.
It was a distributor similar toBest Buy, something like that.
But what they did, what they were famousfor, is that they had a field force.
So they wouldn't just sellcomputers at their shops.
They would have this, force thatwould go out and sell you computers
for your company, and then theywould show up and fix them on demand.

(01:14:55):
This was a major retailer at the time.
And Steve was so lucky that they tookan interest in NeXT because this is
one of the partnerships that couldhave made or break the company.
But Steve being Steve, s-he's still immature at this--
he's about 35 at this, time.

(01:15:16):
He's still immature.
He's not quite learned the lessons ofhis failures yet, and he immediately
moves to alienate Businessland.
He tells them "Your stores suck.They're ugly." Businessland is a
big box retailer they're sellingthose old beige computers for cheap.
They sell them in bulk to companies.
And you have to remember bigcompanies, don't give a shit if

(01:15:39):
your computer is a perfect cube.
That's not even somethingthey think about.
They just want beige box machine.
You, turn it on, it works.
You type data into it, it works.
It can be used across the company.
They want portability, they wantscale, they want these other things
that Steve Jobs is not offering them.
The NeXT sales force isextremely tightly controlled.

(01:16:01):
NeXT has these salesmen who go around thecountry, and will not let Businessland,
partners, actually sell a computer.
These guys, wouldn't be able tosell it because it's just too
hard to sell in the first place.
But as the deal would move forward, theNeXT people would come in, take control
of the deal, try to sell it for them.
But even the NeXT salesmen couldn'tsell it 'cause it was just like,

(01:16:24):
how do you sell a NeXT computer?
So what's the next best solutionif the sales force can't do this?
You call Steve Jobs.
And what is Steve Jobs brilliant at doing?
He's brilliant at standing ona stage and telling you why his
vision is great and then gettingyou to sign on the dotted line.
So Steve would come out, and they didthis thing called Steve on a Stick.

(01:16:44):
That's literally the phrase they use.
Steve would give his theatricalintroduction, talk about how
great the NeXT machine is,and then he would sign a deal.
They would buy 100 computers or so.
became the lifeline of the business.
They were literally sellingcomputers based on the celebrity
of Steve Jobs and how much peoplewanted to be around Steve Jobs.
But the actual sales force couldn't sella computer because they couldn't explain

(01:17:10):
to corporate clients why does it matterthat the cube is a perfect black paint.
Who cares?
Steve could, explain that,but nobody else could.
I will come back, man, because this,the, I've, I was just looking at my notes
here and I'm like, , you're out of time.
You have a young babythere with you as well.
I gotta leave you in peace,but it, it is so much more.

(01:17:32):
We're gonna come back.
I mentioned the reality distortionfield that Steve had, but the next
piece we'll talk about is when realitydistorts back and reality shows up and
goes, "Uh, this ain't working for us."
So I will share links to manyof the conversations that you
had, many of the YouTube videos.
But where is, people wanna reach out andfind you, Geoff, where's the best place?

(01:17:53):
So I'm on social media.
I'm on LinkedIn, GCain, G-C-A-I-N.
I'm on X which is at myname, so Geoffrey_Cain.
You can find me at mywebsite, Geoffreycain.net.
And yeah, I'm always always happy to hearfrom readers if you have any thoughts,
anything that jumps out at you from thisbook, always happy to hear from you.
So just shoot me a message overon X and I'll get back to you.

(01:18:16):
I'm holding up a copy of the book here.
This is not the cover though, so I'mgonna flash it up on the screen and
show you the cover that is out there.
It's brand new book, . Beenin your mind for a long time.
Been in the mind of many,many people who've worked for
Steve Jobs over the years.
The research is fantastic.
I also recommend Geoff's other book,Samsung Rising, which we're gonna cover
in the future when the baby's grown upa little bit and you have a little bit

(01:18:39):
more sleep under the belt as well, Geoff.
Author of Steve Jobs in Exile, GeoffreyCain, thank you for joining us.
Thank you, Aidan
I hope you're enjoying our BusinessBiography series it's with thanks to
our friends at Kyndryl who run and thetechnology systems that drive advantage
for the world's leading businesses.
With a unique blend of AI-poweredconsulting built on unmatched managed

(01:19:01):
service capability, Kyndryl helps leadersharness the power of technology for
smarter decisions, faster innovation,and a lasting competitive edge.
You can find Kyndryl and the KyndrylInstitute, K-Y-N-D-R-Y-L, at kyndryl.com.

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Geoffrey Cain — Steve Jobs in Exile: NeXT, Failure, Revenge and the Remaking of a Visionary

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Geoffrey Cain — Steve Jobs in Exile: NeXT, Failure, Revenge and the Remaking of a Visionary